Creating an Automated Health Attestation System During the COVID-19 Global Pandemic Using Google's G Suite.

As of October 2020, the COVID-19 global pandemic has infected over 40,000,000 people and has claimed over 1,000,000 lives globally (Johns Hopkins University, 2020). To mitigate the spread of the virus and their own liability, organizations have adopted multiple strategies to protect their employees and consumers. In addition to mask wearing, social distancing, and contact tracing, health attestations are being adopted by organizations that depend on physical contact between employees and consumers. The purpose of this tutorial is to describe how an automated health attestation and notification system can be created using Google's G Suite platform at little to no cost to the organization. When combined with other mitigation strategies and strong organizational policies, health attestations may be an effective component for organizations to include in their response to the global pandemic. The benefits and limitations of including health attestations as a component within an organization's COVID-19 policies are discussed.

Backward conditioning of tumor necrosis factor-α in a single trial: changing intervals between exposures to lipopolysaccharide and saccharin taste.

The current study examined the effect of backward conditioning with three different time intervals between exposures to lipopolysaccharide (LPS) as the unconditioned stimulus (US) and saccharin taste in water as the potential conditioned stimulus (CS). Forty-eight naïve female BALB/c mice at three months of age served as subjects, divided into six groups. Four groups were assigned to Experiment 1 for the tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α) measure, and the remaining two groups were used in Experiment 2 to measure taste aversion behavior. Both experiments employed a single trial. The timing of introduction to the saccharin taste varied between 3 min, 7 h, and 24 h following an LPS injection in Experiment 1. Experiment 2 employed the three-minute interval only. These intervals correspond to distinct immunological, physiological, and behavioral events induced by LPS. On the day after re-exposure to the saccharin taste, the TNF-α groups were challenged with LPS to test the LPS tolerance response. While backward conditioning of taste aversion behavior was not observed, some evidence of conditioned TNF-α response and subsequent development of LPS tolerance was observed with backward conditioning in a single trial. This exploratory study demonstrated that the effect of backward conditioning on conditioned TNF-α response and LPS tolerance response in a single trial depended on the timing of when a CS is presented after LPS exposure.